Augmenting Authoring of Adaptation Languages via Visual Environments

Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) ideally allows for the delivery of the right information to the right student. Strategies for adaptation can be described via the LAG language. The PEAL tool offers many common programming environment features to ease development in LAG but authoring adaptation strategies is still considered timeconsuming and difficult, especially for the inexperienced author. Visual Programming Environments have been shown to ease entry to programming for a new platform for beginner and experienced programmers. In this paper we ease entry to adaptation strategy authoring by providing a visual environment for creating strategies alongside the text-based programming environment of PEAL which propagates changes from either representation to the other. This allows the lay person author to create adaptation strategies with little experience of programming or the LAG language while becoming familiar with LAG at their own pace, thus lowering the threshold for authoring in the complex environment of Adaptive Hypermedia.